This year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival opened with La Bella Otero, a full-length narrative work from Spain’s leading dance company, Ballet Nacional de España.
La Bella Otero offers a lively, entertaining showcase of Spanish dance – always popular in Hong Kong, as the rapturous reception from the audience showed – and Noelia Ruiz did an excellent job of conveying star quality, high energy and sexual allure in the title role.
On the downside, choreographer Ruben Olmo and dramaturge Gregor Acuña-Pohl fell short on coherent dramatic narrative and in-depth character development in a somewhat simplistic production that failed to do their protagonist’s extraordinary story justice.
